Enhance Your 404 Page With Webmaster Tools

I was busy browsing around in Google Webmaster Tools earlier tonight as usual and ran across a new feature that they added. About a week and a half ago I wrote a post about converting a 404 page visitor into a reader. I talked a little bit about how most theme designers and web designers rarely ever put any significant effort into a 404 page. Hopefully you shouldn’t be having any 404 issues but somebody may link to you wrong or you may even incorrectly link to a post or page on your site.

Having a custom 404 page gives you a chance to turn your disgruntled (nobody likes visiting a site only to receive an error) visitor into a possible reader or customer. But most people never put anything into this page other then a Page not found error, which provides no chance to keep your visitor on your site.

Inside of Webmaster Tools under the Tools section you can find the new feature, Enhance 404 pages. This tool is in the experimental stages but the features it provides are a whole lot better then a Page not found error. The widget will provide a closest match URL trying to match the URL that the visitor came from with an actual URL on your site, a search box for your site with related suggestions and can also provide relevant links to other pages on your site.

Google has made it extremely easy to implement this widget into your 404 page and provides translations in 26 different languages. All you have to do is select your language and copy the code provided in the grey box.

The default template that Google uses is quite bland and will most likely not match your site, so Google has provided you with a page on how to use CSS to change the overall look.

How does your 404 error page measure up? Do you even know if you have one? I downloaded 5 themes from the WordPress Theme Directory to see what their 404 pages contained. 1 of them didn’t even have a 404 error page while the others provided the standard Page not found error. As great as it would be if everything worked out perfect that can never happen. You can’t control the URL that other webmasters use to link to your site until you find out where the link is and politely ask them to fix it.

In my post I gave you 4 things to add to your 404 page and depending upon your site you could always add more to better your chances at turning a visitor into a reader or a customer.